A late night at the grocery store: I’m picking up the kind of things one typically buys after the hardest day of the week: gelato, and silly candy, and maybe a few staples. And in conversation with my checker — one of the jobs a U-Scan-It computer cannot and will never duplicate — he tells me that he’s leaving in a week to go back to school to study ag and ag business under a USDA program to help beginning farmers.

He’s surely in his 50s. But he has that gleam that people have on the cusp of a new adventure. He has friends with land and cattle. He knows that when he goes into a barn at night, there won’t be any time clock hanging from the rafters. He’s going to spend his days outdoors, in connection with animals and the soil, and eating the best food he’s ever tasted. “Our beef is really good,” he confides, “but it can’t touch my friends’ beef.” His optimism is like a virus, and I walk out of the store, into the summer night, grinning.

I have farms on my mind this week. Colorado seems carpeted in cornfields this year, which is both nostalgic and worrisome to me. I come from corn farmers. We’d drive south from the Chicago suburbs to my grandfather’s 80 acres in central Illinois, 80 acres that had fed and clothed and sent to college two sons and two daughters. All the long summers, I’d watch the rows of corn fly by in my car windows like spokes of some giant wheel. The smell of corn pollen filled the air. As teenagers my cousins made their summer money on detasseling crews, or leading detasseling crews. My uncles made good livings selling DeKalb and Pioneer seed corn, in the days when hybridized seed was the latest innovation and GMO wasn’t even a glimmer in the brain of an undergrad.

But for my grandfather, it wasn’t an easy life. My mother began her life during the Depression. She was 16 before the farm got indoor plumbing, and she remembers my grandfather wrapping the kids’ legs in newspaper to insulate them against the Illinois winters on their walk to the school he’d helped to build. She remembers eating home-made sausage preserved in fat through the winter. She helped my grandmother can vegetables and fruit in a steamy kitchen, by necessity, not by inclination. I learned only recently that, through some disaster or crop failure, my grandfather had to sell some piece of the farm that was to have been passed on to my Uncle Vernon, and my mother sat him down and told him that he should go to college at the nearby University of Illinois. He followed her advice and, nearing 80, is still grateful to my mother.

Farming, of any kind, is still not an easy life, and that’s why I shop at farmer’s markets all summer and fall. I know promising, eager young farmers who’ve left Colorado because of the high price of land. The fields of corn around me — a patchwork alternating with fallow land, soybeans, acres of sunflowers — look good now, tasseling out above my head, filling my nighttime commute with their scent. A cornfield is a big presence. It towers above you. Sweet corn or field corn, once it gets a good start it grows inches overnight. You can almost watch it. It changes the landscape. But there is nothing sadder than flooded, or drought-starved, or ailing corn. That’s what Oklahoma and parts of Texas have now. Corn is a thirsty, hungry crop. It’s the crop people think of first when they think of all of the evils of big Ag: subsidies, chemical pesticides and fertilizer, soil erosion, genetic modification, and what we “shouldn’t” be feeding to beef cattle. And at the price it’s selling for now — which is a dollar less a bushel than it was selling for in spring — you can’t blame farmers for planting it.

We’ll see how this corn-ucopia changes Colorado. Corn stubble, left in the field, helps hold snow in a field to provide winter moisture, cover for wildlife. Corn cash might help some farmers hold their land. I’ll remember my childhood summers, running across the furrows to help my grandfather pull sweet corn from the stalks once the pot to cook it in was already boiling.

Susan,
Thank you for reminding me about corn and farms. My favorite corn field memory is driving across Iowa (pre-GMO corn!) at dusk, right after a thunderstorm. We looked out across the fields in amazement: they were just covered with lightening bugs, blinking their little lights on and off! The corn stalks amost glowed there were so many fireflys. I had never seen anything like that before, and haven’t since! It was one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring things I have ever experienced. K.

H.

Susan,
I loved reading about the clerk going back to school to follow his passion, but I really loved reminiscing about my “corn days” as a child who visited her parents’ hometown in central Illinois. We went to visit my grandparents every year during the Sweetcorn Festival. It was the best darn corn I’ve ever had–to this day! H.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.